Oregonian nearly became President; lucky he didn’t
New York schemers sought to have Joseph Lane named President. Had they succeeded, the Civil War likely would have been the North seceding fr...
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Offbeat Oregon History podcast
A daily (5-day-a-week) podcast feed of true Oregon stories -- of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold. Stories of shanghaied sailors and Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robber...
Episodes
20 of 334 episodes
The Maddest Man in Town: A story of a wake that 'worked' — the deceased woke right up!
'Are ya religious? If ya are I won’t tell this story. Awright, I guess it won’t hurt ya none to hear it. It’s about old man Donovan. He was...
WPA writers captured a snapshot of early Oregon
IN 1935, IN the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. Congress passed what’s sometimes called the “Second New Deal.” It was a $4.88 billi...
Rabies epidemic was like a war in Eastern Oregon
State health officials scoffed at the idea of hydrophobia in Oregon — until people started dying. It was the start of a decade of attacks by...
Murderer avoided gallows by faking a 2-year coma
Charles Fiester lay there on his cot, eyes open, staring at nothing, pretending to be catatonic, for 515 days ... knowing that when his ruse...
Jumbo jet landed at tiny rural airport by mistake
Troutdale Airfield is just 10 miles from Portland International — and built to serve Cessnas, not Boeings. But one dark night in 1962, a jum...
The Prineville Vigilantes: Part Three — The Resistance, and the Fall.
Crook County citizens finally decided they'd had enough of the secretive lynchings and killings; they banded together and defeated the gang...
The Prineville Vigilantes: Part Two — The Shadow Government
Crook Count was formed at the height of Vigilante ascendancy, so when the governor named prominent locals to leadership positions in the new...
The Prineville Vigilantes: Part 1 — The Lynch Mob, and the Rise.
In Crook County, the early 1880s were like something out of a Louis L'Amour novel: Masked riders galloping around by night, dispensing what...
Tillamook Guerillas were ready for enemy invasion
When the Oregon National Guard was called up at the start of World War II, Oregonians felt vulnerable to Japanese invasion. So they loaded t...
Joseph Drake: Murderer, or just an innocent patsy?
It's nearly certain that Drake was guilty only of extreme naivete — and his landlord, after murdering a neighbor, knew he could pin the crim...
Innocent man’s sacrifice averted deadly ‘tong war’
It was obvious to nearly everyone that Chee Gong was innocent. But one of his tong brothers had murdered Lee Yik and disappeared, and blood...
Schooner crew locked in a race with fiery death
Below decks, a chemical fire burned freely through the hold of the Challenger; above deck, her crew worked desperately in a hurricane windst...
A deadly marine concert of timidity, incompetence
The wreck of the steamship Czarina: A cascade of bad decisions by nearly everyone involved resulted in the worst possible outcome: 23 marine...
Union squabbles were part of life on the waterfront
Every few years, in the early 1900s, burly and hard-fisted dock workers got into a battle of wills with the autocratic sea-captains who ran...
Davy Crockett in Oregon? Yes, but only in ‘tall tales’
In the tall tales of 1840s almanacs, the “King of the Wild Frontier” had a lively interest in the Beaver State. But he did get a few of his...
Was legendary city of Quivira on Oregon Coast?
Native Americans told Coronado there was a fabulous gold-and-turquoise city called Quivira just to the east - or was it the north? All he fo...
Skipper’s refusal to leave ship angered rescuers
At great personal risk, Coast Guardsmen had to rescue the skipper twice, because he insisted on staying aboard the stranded steamship to def...
“Camp Castaway” was an inconvenient miracle
Feeling lucky to be alive, the soldiers and sailors of the shipwrecked schooner Captain Lincoln got busy salvaging everything off their stra...
Bridge-building scandal aroused Portlanders’ fury
Crafty county commissioners tried to rig the bidding so their favorite bid, padded to the tune of half a million 1924 dollars, would win —bu...